Parallel Stories: A Novel (159 page)

If he told this story to Madzar, he would have used up the last remaining bit of love or illusion that he and Madzar retained from their childhood or perhaps could not abandon.

It did not help to take an inventory of his acquaintances, lovers, and all the people who had abandoned him. Or those whom he had abandoned, even though they loved him or he loved them; he found no one among them. And in that case, he could not vomit up all the human beauty and all the human filth onto someone’s feet, it would be impossible.

All in vain, it was all in vain.

It would probably be better, morally more correct too, to kill his sleeping little boy first and then do away with himself.

But he could barely catch his breath, saying, well, I’ve calmed down a little and at least half a year has gone by, it’s time for me to accept that she didn’t leave on a whim and will soon be back, but that she’s left for good, she’s gone.

And on top of it all, here is the bright, sunny, life-filled sensation of a horrible summer morning. As he stands in the living room of their apartment with the telephone in his hand, and does not understand.

Bygone seconds were passing.

But he does not understand what Mária Szapáry, at the other end of the line, is saying, what sort of clinic she is talking about. On such an ordinary Sunday morning.

Then she finished what she had to say; there was silence on the line.

Fate had taken its revenge on the women; their fucking fate screwed them but good.

So what had happened, and what was he supposed to do. Revenge had been taken for everything done to him and to his little boy, and it was very nice of fate to have done this, it was wonderful. Life was worth living after all, because there was such a thing as revenge, and God has given us murder as our freedom.

And then he was saved, at least.

At last, at last.

Summoned by Szapáry’s telephone call, now he was mindlessly racing with his car up and down the empty, freshly watered Sunday-morning streets and roads. In his confusion—at once disgraceful happiness and uplifting dread—he felt the breath of freedom on his skin, and he lost his way a number of times before he reached the neurological clinic.

Let it end, if it has come to its end.

Or it shouldn’t depend on him, though everything is already lost. He knew it; he knew what would happen, though his revenge was sweet. There was no hope that one fine day Elisa would return with her little suitcase. Yet she looks at him with her innocently open and indifferent visage as if nothing has happened for more than half a year.

Why must he still love this horrid being so much.

Or why must revenge taste as sweet as honey.

Why does he love this human creature, lacking every moral standard, so much that he can’t give up hope even at the penultimate moment.

She comes back to torture him even more.

He could no longer cherish even this little hope.

There will be no new beginning, there is no such luck, only pure disaster prevails on earth, and everything is lost.

I’ve put my foot in it again.

Lady Erna did not know exactly what she had put her foot in, but she felt in the stiff silence that she had.

Actually, she had a high opinion of her own heft, including her sturdy feet.

And even if she knew what she had done there was no reason to blame her for anything. To her overweening self, the decent Bellardi boy was not an independent figure whose fate one spends time thinking about and possibly even identifying with a bit. He simply belonged to the populous team of young men who performed certain personal and scientific services for Dr. Lehr. They too were considered devotees of tactical conformity. Following the professor’s instruction, they zealously studied the source, the works of Baltasar Gracián. They translated him from the Spanish or Latin originals, from French and German, or made extracts from his writings based on the old texts. They jotted down and then typed out multiple copies of Professor Lehr’s relevant comments. They compiled small catechisms from the original and not easily understood texts of
El Discreto
, putting them side by side with Dr. Lehr’s aphoristic notes. And as happens with other copied and commentated literature, after a certain time one could not exactly tell where the Gracián text ended and the Lehr interpretation began. At any rate, adages were born from sentences such as, few manage to avoid the guile of Fortuna, or, thus great fortunes usually end in ignominy.

The squeezed-out blood orange too is turned out of the golden bowl and thrown in the garbage can.

Most of the students had never seen a blood orange, let alone a golden bowl.

They too saw no option except tactical conformity, and that is why they understood the pretty simile in their own ways.

They had to know what was useful or useless for the secret movement, what they should cherish in their private lives and what in their social life, what they should carefully nurture and what they should discard, uproot, weed out, trample on, and throw in the garbage.

They should have no scruples. If necessary, they should exploit anyone; squeeze the last drop of talent out of anyone, as they would the juice from a blood orange. The apparent selfishness and possible ruthlessness of their decisions should not disturb their moral sensibility. Fool and deceive anyone they needed to deceive. It is through the students, by the work of their hands, through their collaboration or, in given cases, through assassinations or murders committed by them, that the collectivity of the race will save what can be saved.

The fate and existence of entire generations are at stake when they make their decisions and act according to the selfish interests of the Hungarian people.

Should not let go of and never harm the holy bond.

And they should not act the same way all the time; they must occasionally confuse their antagonists and enemies.

It’s easy to hit the bird flying in a straight line, but not the one that flips over in flight, that makes unexpected turns.

A good card player never plays the card his rival expects, and definitely not the one that would help his rival win.

Unless Dr. Lehr wished it otherwise, his wife, Lady Erna, too, conformed to the feudal system of relationships. She never asked the professor about matters that were not her business. She did not spend time with his young men, because she kept a strict distance from the perfidious power-related intrigues of the professor’s hangers-on. She minded her own business. They both knew that these intrigues were unavoidable, and they could not mention them even between themselves and not even scornfully; they had to remain above it all, they had to use and exploit the group’s inner conflicts imperceptibly or mete out justice among the insurgents. Pretty girls or attractive women could not be mixed up with the hangers-on, because only males were members of this secret society, which was more than enough for her own security.

But she did not let down her guard.

On his part, the professor saw to it that he acquired permanent or occasional lovers from places where no one had any connection with his university or the academic world. This was not difficult, since commonness was his weakness; classical promiscuity, things dirty, the darkest obscenity, held his senses in thrall, everything beyond the range of legitimate social life.

He struggled valiantly with himself all his life; he wanted to conquer his weakness or at least clean it up a little, if only because for long decades the pure, spiritualized manly life was both his ideal and his hobbyhorse.

At least the need for cleanliness, if not cleanliness itself. Life, conceived in blood and ending in darkness, must seek light and cleanliness, as Gracián would say, it cannot do otherwise.

However, Dr. Lehr simply loved everything that was nasty and hideous. He could not resist loving everything that was filthy, dark, base, treacherous, soiled, and vulgar. Of course, he dismissed the theory of instinctual life.

Jewish idiocy.

But he valued very simple copulations, which he believed were inherent and which most emphatically confirmed life. He loved that; there was no other way to put it. He pitted Jewish libido against a theory of innate copulation. Biological and racial conceptions stood behind this theory, which he spoke about to his students in detail. Who could consider it accidental that Jews preoccupied themselves with their instinctual life so as to guide the world along the alleged libido of that life. He did not elaborate on the nature of inherent copulation with his students; they all probably knew what they were supposed to think about, what natural theory.

True, he did toy with it in a different register, the way, let us say, he loved his wife. Whom he treated with great courtesy and appreciation.

But what could he do if he loved unsought-for copulation, he loved its inherency, and therefore he had to immerse himself in it again and again. He submerged himself, but he loved not knowing the names of these women. To know nothing, to be not curious about them; it would disturb him if he did. Sometimes he didn’t even see their genitalia or faces.

At most, he might feel a sharp elbow in his stomach. He would be groping and pawing under unwashed sweaters and blouses reeking with sweat; the breath of the lower classes would touch him, the smell of onions and carious teeth.

But there’s no need to fear this, because the impersonal feeling of orgasm quickly overwhelms sensations that are imbued with social ideas.

Besides the memory of their being unwashed, nothing remained of their persons.

I’ll go out for a spell, my darling.

Go on, my sweet.

For a little walk, with your permission.

You move frightfully little as it is.

On evenings like this, he simply had to get up from his desk.

I’ll air out my head a bit, he would say to himself on evenings when he could no longer resist the temptation or suppress his darkly gaping proclivity. It was not that raw, physical signals reminded him of his desires, no, there were no such signals. Rather, he feared the consequences of such an outing and therefore felt completely devoid of desire. But he could not resist an indefinable mental attraction, a sort of barbarian inclination. And he knew this was a pagan, mystic attraction, a primordial one, an archaic proclivity.

Symptoms of his inclination were reinforced during the previous week, or perhaps symptoms from previous millennia signaled their permanence in him by suggesting that he could do it with anyone, anywhere, at any time.

They signaled to him and he followed them. He could not have known—and this was the essence of this intimate pagan attraction—what drew him on in the night, why he did not even try to understand why he should go and where; he should simply go as if under a magic spell.

He had to set out in a night filled with unknown dangers, to follow nothing but the call of the blood pumping from his heart, its restless beating, to surrender himself, defying all danger, to the primal forces of an unknown, natural godhead. He had to be swift and inventive. The mere thought filled him with strength and charged his cool, passionless spirit. Sometimes he would not give in to the call for days, fearing that his passion would devour him whole. He could not stay out longer than an hour and a half. And he could not think he was alone with his pagan sin and enjoyment in this city, because at different secret points it turned the reality of its other parts upside down. He didn’t need more time. He knew these places and saw what he saw in the motionless city night.

Besides, he could not take more without giving in to contempt and disgust.

Dr. Lehr was a man of the old school, a spiritually demanding real gentleman, and Lady Erna especially appreciated his refined sense of discretion. No matter how much she suffered because of these little anthropological sallies, which always left small innocent traces, she both respected his need for them and found an explanation for them. Any of those traces could have exposed him, yet she thought it better not to mention them. She knew well that scientific activity had strictly confidential strands and currents that might lead to very dangerous political illegality, and she accused herself in her infernal jealousy of mixing up these strands. While in her feverish imagination her husband was chasing some unseemly female, he in fact had to attend a conspiratorial meeting. Instead of making unfair accusations, she should worry if he forgot to take his hat or scarf, and she should consider his brief absences part of his academic work.

Even though she saw mud on the heels of his shoes in dry weather.

Occasionally, Lehr wound up at the City Park lake, where human traffic was intense under the plane trees. That is where he met the greatest inherent love of his life, to whom his memory continued to return with an unquenchable thirst. As they cautiously approached each other in the alternately stronger and dimmer lights from the gas lamps on the promenade, uncertainty gripped him. Perhaps the figure coming nearer was not a shapely woman but an effeminate man. He had to be careful about that in the darkness; it could turn dangerous. There were places in the city where the boundaries of areas favored by different sexual preferences were uncertain or simply overlapped and merged. But uncertainty did not halt the steps of either of them. Professor Lehr carefully avoided places that had lost their borders. Anyway, the figure brought with it the sound of swishing feminine clothes and was dangling something in its hands. He saw that she was barefoot, which made his heart beat in his throat, a sign at once of joy and dread; obviously, she’d taken off her high-heeled sandals on the mowed lawn. Above their heads the leaves of the plane trees rustled quietly in the silent night.

They both behaved erratically in the dark.

Farther off, other human shadows could be seen approaching and then receding. First the two of them would observe each other, retreat a little to observe again and gauge the other’s interest from a distance—that was the accepted safe thing to do at places like this—and then, estimating the degree of danger, approach each other again.